Facelifts by a handlift

Feb 28, 2020, 07.51 AM IST

NEW YORK: Barring admission to medical school or catastrophic injury, most of us will go our whole lives without much contemplating the grisly framework that enables and constrains our bodily movement.

But what if, in exchange for subjecting yourself to that existential reckoning, you could have zhuzhed cheeks and a temporary glow?

For an increasing number of Brooklyn residents for whom any price is a small price to pay for any good or service, the answer is a radiant yes.

The result is what the aesthetician Carrie Lindsey describes as a “nonsurgical facelift.” In her salon, Lindsey methodically rearranges the clay of her clients’ features until they resemble their own almost imperceptibly more attractive evil twins. She achieves this effect by smushing and smooshing and spreading and stretching their faces, for upward of an hour, and then (having donned gloves) rooting around inside their mouths for several minutes.

A description on the Carrie Lindsey Beauty website declares the treatment “the Brancusi of facials,” implying even if you are the type of person who doesn‘t know what Brancusi is, let alone what constitutes its facial equivalent, it sounds indescribably luxurious.

A Brancusi of feels like being alternately treasured and ravaged, pulled and gently slapped and firmly pressed, like pizza dough that has dropped on a human skeleton and now must be rubbed into the skeleton to hide this mistake.

Before and after photos will reveal that your skin no longer sagged in places you hadn’t known it sagged.

After an initial assessment, during which she scrutinises what she calls “the knit” of her client’s skin, Lindsey begins the treatment by pressing gently around the clavicle, underarms and jawline — locations of lymph nodes. She works her way more forcefully up the neck to the face. The movements, she said, are intended to encourage activity in the lymphatic and circulatory systems, to “feed” the skin.

“I’m not feeding it just topically with a mask or serum. Your body’s feeding your new skin cells. And I think that’s great.”